The Enemy Is Among Us

We are regularly told
by interventionists — whether they be U.S. government employees or
neoconservative government wannabes — that the United States
can readily determine who is friendly and who is not in remote civil
wars in the developing world. The first basic rule in any
war — whether it be a conventional or counterinsurgency war — is
to know who is on your team and who is not. To the uninitiated,
this might seem like an easy task. And in a conventional war, in
which both sides wear distinctive uniforms, it is much easier than
in a counterinsurgency conflict, in which the enemy wears no
specific uniform or mark of designation and the enemy’s strategy is to
strike and then melt back into the general population.

In Afghanistan, the
Taliban guerrillas actually put on their enemy’s uniforms,
those of the Afghan military, and try to kill Afghan soldiers or
their international allies. This problem of “green-on-blue “
attacks has been well publicized recently. The growing number of
such attacks has accounted for 15% of the deaths of
international troops this year, including a recent suicide bombing
by a member of Afghan intelligence that killed two Americans and
even more fellow Afghan intelligence personnel. And Afghan
intelligence troops are supposed to be more rigorously vetted than
other Afghan security forces.

U.S. training of Afghan
soldiers now has been significantly impaired because of U.S.
suspicion of Afghan forces. The U.S. military commanders in
Afghanistan regularly tell us that most such green-on-blue attackers are not
Taliban infiltrators but disgruntled Afghan soldiers.
But statistics in war are often manipulated, and those commanders
have a great incentive to minimize the lethal problem of guerrilla
infiltration in the Afghan security forces’ ranks.

The U.S. government has
proven that it can’t even vet government organizations it is
assisting, let alone individual soldiers. Since 9/11, the U.S. has
given tens of billions of dollars in aid to Pakistan, which has an
intelligence agency, or parts thereof, that is clearly aiding the
Afghan Taliban enemy. And the U.S. government still is not getting
it: this is the same Pakistani intelligence agency that, in the
1980s, gave most of the weapons donated by the U.S. to fight the
Soviets in Afghanistan to the most radical Islamist guerrillas, thus
spawning al-Qaeda.

This lesson — that
during a chaotic brushfire war, it is hard to make sure weapons
don’t get into the hands of the wrong, dangerous people — has
not only been lost on the U.S. government, but even more so on Mitt
Romney and his neoconservative foreign policy advisers. As if the
Obama administration’s encouraging Turkey, Qatar, and
Saudi Arabia to send small arms to the Syrian rebels — by helping
those countries vet the Syrian groups that get the weapons — weren’t
bad enough, the high-testosterone Romney crowd wants to up the ante
by sending heavy arms, such as hand-held anti-tank and anti-aircraft
weapons, through these countries to the insurgents. The problem
with this potentially disastrous proposal became apparent when it
was discovered that Syrian Islamists are receiving the lion’s
share of the small arms already sent. So much for U.S.
intelligence’s ability to vet arms recipients during an
anarchic civil war. All we need is radical Islamists with an
ability to shoot down civilian airliners or use hand-held
anti-tank weapons on buildings, energy facilities, or other key
infrastructure. New video exists of the first use of heat-seeking, shoulder-fired anti-aircraft weapons by Syrian rebels.

Thus, radical Islamists could already have this ability, because huge quantities of such
hand-held weapons were reportedly in Moammar Gadhafi’s weapons
storehouses in Libya. Unfortunately, these weapons were “liberated”
along with country when a U.S.-led coalition overthrew the Gadhafi
government. Predictably, given the tribal schisms in Libya, these heavy weapons may very well have fallen into the hands of the many militias that fought Gadhafi
in that civil war and are now destabilizing the country and killing
U.S. diplomats. Some of these Libyan heavy weapons also may have migrated to Syria via the black market or other means, and they certainly would arrive there if a future President Romney provided them directly to Syrian rebels to overthrow the Syrian government. Apparently, the Romney neocons haven’t
learned that overthrowing dictators doesn’t necessarily lead
to positive outcomes.

The case of
Libya also shows that government interventionism usually requires
more government meddling to “fix” problems with the
initial foray. The U.S. government is now funding the creation of a
Libyan commando unit to counter the tribal militias and Islamist
radicals, such as those that assassinated the U.S. ambassador and
other diplomats, which it unleashed by taking out Gadhafi. Of
course, the U.S. will need to vet recruits to the new commando force
to make sure it is free of Islamist radicals. The New
York Times quotes Frederic Wehrey, an expert
on Libyan security, as noting, “Overall, it’s a sound
strategy, but my concern is that in the vetting they make sure this
doesn’t become a Trojan horse for the militias to come in.”
But given the poor past history of the U.S. vetting security forces in
messy war zones, it may not be a sound strategy at all.